


The only way back

by Aerithari



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Episode 12, Yuri Plisetsky is a Brat, Yuri learns a thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 03:57:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9054436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerithari/pseuds/Aerithari
Summary: A skater’s heart is made of glass, they say. When Yuri Plisetsky’s ankle breaks, it almost shatters everything else.For why does Yurochka skate, other than pride?





	

Yuri Plisetsky hears the crack before he feels the pain. At first it's only a dull thump in his ankle, like he's knocked something off the table, out of place, but he can't find what it was that had fallen. He tumbles to his knees in a daze, having failed the jump, but that's all right. You can get up from this.

A shooting pain, hot as camera lights, jolts up his leg, into his middle.

Shit.

Maybe not from this. Just…give it a second. _It’s fine, probably just landed funny, I can skate back and take a look at it, it’s fine._ His inner voice swells higher and higher. _Get up you fucking dumbass!_

He doesn’t get back up.

\--

He’s crying angry tears, face against the frozen floor. They crawl down his cheeks. He feels one drip off from his chin, but he doesn’t hear it hit the ice. He’s not sure how much time passes, but he knows, in a very bitter part of his mind, that this is what he gets for practicing alone. For stomping away from Yuuri and Viktor and Yakov and declaring, not for the first time, that he doesn’t need them in order to work.

He has a body to tame, and not enough time in the world to do it.

His limbs are getting longer. Muscles sprout unwanted around his arms and legs. He used to curse his youthful, nigh-feminine litheness, but at least he learned how to use it. He had honed it into a weapon with which he captured gold.

He doesn’t know this new body. And now he has broken it.

\--

The Katsudon finds him first, of course, but that’s probably the least bad of the potential outcomes. Yuuri has enough honor not to rub it in his face _ever_ again.

Still.

“Yurio?” Yuuri skates over nonchalantly. He doesn’t joke around like Viktor might have. _Are you sleeping, Yurio? Oh ho ho._ Yuri will give him that. But Katsudon takes one look at Yuri’s fucking tear-stained face and then his ankle and –

“Oh, god, Yurio. Are you all right?”

Yuri makes a face but he gets the words out, garbled by tears. “Fell pretty bad.”

The older Yuuri fumbles a phone out of his jacket pocket and says something about calling Yuri’s grandpa or Viktor or anyone with a car, frankly, but Yuri doesn’t respond to any of it. He just lays there, and thinks about the jump. How did it go wrong that time? He taught Katsudon that jump. The magnificently simple quadruple salchow – simple, at least, once you practice it 5000 times. What a fucking betrayal, for it to go this wrong.

But he hurts too badly for clear thought. The shooting pain presses up into the back of his skull like a cruel finger. _Look at what you did._

He’s still crying when his grandpa arrives.

_Oh, Yurochka. Look at what you’ve done._

\--

_You are almost out of high school, Yurochka._ His grandfather was in a contemplative mood, he recalls bitterly now. _What are you thinking for the future?_

_I don’t know._ Pieces of sandwich fly out of his mouth. He can’t get enough food before practices these days. _Skate. Get lots of money._

His grandfather had just laughed.

_You skate for money?_

_No_ , he had said, _but why not?_

His grandpa looked over the steering wheel for a long moment, biting his lip.

_Someone’s gotta provide for your retirement,_ Yuri declared at the time, but he can’t – not even here in the hospital as science rays shoot through his legs – erase the face his grandfather made from his memory.

_Yuri,_ he had said. His eyes were distant, confused, but piercing. _That isn’t a life._

\--

“Yurochka. Could be worse. At least you don’t need surgery.”

His grandpa is the most supportive voice in the waiting room. Everyone else is silent too long or speaks too loudly or doesn’t look at him right. He could do without their continuous, worried commentary about his increasing height, his growing musculature.

Like he doesn’t already know.

_Who do you think you are, looking at me like that, huh?_

“How could I not be used to my own stupid legs?” Yuri says. “What a stupid thing to say.”

Yuuri just sighs and puts two fingers to his temple, unwilling to engage. Viktor raises an eyebrow at the blond Yuri.

“It’s called growth,” Viktor says, droll as ever. “You were the Russian Fairy for a reason. Now you’ll just have to learn to be like the rest of us.”

He says it so casually, like it couldn’t possibly crush Yuri at all. He steels himself.

“You knew this was coming,” Yakov adds unhelpfully. Yes, Yuri did know.

It’s the disappointment in their voices that gets to him.

\--

“This will be good for you,” Lilia says, and not without a hint of irony. She helps him stretch and keeps careful eye on the placement of his ankle. “Teach you a lesson in humility, perhaps. How to listen to your coaches.”

_I am the Ice Tiger of Russia. Stretching. At the edge of the rink._

He watches Yuuri and Viktor practice their own routines until he almost has them memorized. A quadruple toe-loop here. A combination jump in the second half, when the music swells just so. A step sequence set to a _pa cha cha_ rhythm. He studies hard. He watches until his eyes dry out and he has to blink so fiercely that tears nearly escape.

It’s fine. Boring, but fine. Not untenable. But then they finish actual practice, and Yuuri turns on some strange pop song that Yuri actually recognizes, and Viktor and Yuuri both go onto the ice together, laughing. Viktor has his hand on Yuuri’s lower back and their fingers lace together for a moment, the light catching on their gold rings.

Yuri suddenly feels a black hole open up just beneath his belly button. _My routine will be about love…_

It’s all there, on the ice. The exact thing the Katsudon says eventually becomes expression on the ice. They’re just skating for fun now. This isn’t a routine. It’s just them messing around, laughing in each other’s faces, skating so close their legs could twine together and they could fall.

_I am the Ice Tiger of Russia!_

But with a body that won’t cooperate (“A body that needs healing,” Viktor gently reminds him, _whatever_ ), planning is worthless. He sits on the bench and imagines the ice melting until everything is flooded and the only way out is to swim.

\--

At home, looking in the mirror, he feels loathing.

It battles against a defensive anger – he is who he is, that’s never stopped him.

It’s never been like this.

School will soon be over. He never liked it, but at least it was there. Something to pass the time, to comfort him that he was, in fact, living life in a single direction. Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth. Onward and upward. Junior division to senior. He’s been on rails. But now he can see them, and he can see them end, broken off at the edge of a cliffside, no bridge in sight. No more school. And right now – no more skating.

No more Russian Fairy.

His grandpa calls for dinner. He doesn’t leave his room.

\--

Beauty and ferocity. “Borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The Great Gatsby. He’d read that in an American Literature class and that stuck with him – the idea that the past will always try to drag you back, that you will be, at some point, a slave to it. When Lilia came to teach him, she was the first one to understand.

Skating is a form of beauty, but he only knows it as rebellion. When you are _just pretty enough_ , everyone thinks they can touch you, emulate you.

But when you are beautiful, so devastating that it breaks something just beyond the walls of your heart – everyone looks on with awe and fear.

No one ever reaches for you again. Safely behind the ice, no one can break you.

\--

“Why do you live with your grandfather?” Viktor gets the nerve to ask one day. It is unusually warm and nerves are both frazzled by practice and wilted by the heat. Yuri is in a strange mental place and everyone, it seems, can feel it in the air. A sizzling. A change in weather. “Tell me about him.”

The Katsudon looks aghast at Viktor’s brazenness.

“None of your business, old man,” Yuri snaps. “Who taught you manners?”

They are used to his bristling, but not to his vile nature. Yuuri shakes his head and throws a hand up as if to say _I’m giving you space._ Viktor’s face screws up for a moment ( _Is he going to yell_?), but then he nods slightly, apologetic.

If only they were always that easy to manage.

He feels guilt immediately.

He lies down on a bench and stares at the ceiling, and he is like that when Grandpa arrives unannounced. He can smell the pirozkis before he can see them, and his stomach rattles in response. He hasn’t eaten all day except for the oatmeal Grandpa forced him to eat this morning. Nothing sounds good anymore. Eating is a chore.

“Dinner,” Grandpa announces, voice gruff as he tromps in from the cold. Yuuri and Viktor observe – they wave from a distance – but they wait. They opt to go back to work.

Yuri wants to resist, to control how and where his body grows. He wills his arms and legs to stop growing. Grandpa sits next to him, sitting the food purposefully close to him. The food is too hot. The air stifles him.

“Eat,” he commands.

“Not hungry,” Yuri grumbles.

Grandpa snorts. “You are a big liar.”

“I’m nobody.”

The words slip out, unbidden. Horrible and quiet and true. His thoughts swirl, struggling against one another like leaves in a wind storm. Too much change is happening at once. Who is he, except a skater?

“Nobody and worthless,” he adds, because once he starts talking about it, he can’t stop. “I should just quit everything.”

He expects Grandpa to say something sarcastic and supportive to beat back this incessant whining – _That’s true. Now please eat your dinner, you big no one, before you go back to practice, which is apparently sleeping these days. Tomorrow will be better._

Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s been the weeks of Yuri languishing at home, staring at the television trying not to think about routines. All he ever thinks about is routines. What is left?

Grandpa is not smiling. His face is hard, deeply closed. His eyes shine like cold marbles left on the sidewalk.

“Why would you say this?” he hisses. “Would you say it to a friend?”

That’s when the tears come.

He doesn’t know. Would he say it to someone like Otabek, who he hasn’t texted in a week (out of shame or what? He still doesn’t know)? What about Yuko, or god forbid those two lovebird skaters who he can feel staring at him now—

Probably. He wouldn’t mean it the same. But…

He covers his face and says nothing.

\--

He walks near the old pond near their neighborhood. The ice is still too thin to skate upon, as winter is just now settling in once again. He hikes its perimeter with Grandpa.

“Strength is wasted on the youth,” he mumbles, laughing good-naturedly as Yuri once again surpasses his pace, even with an ankle in the last phases of healing.

He hates it when Grandpa speaks of age. Hates it. Feels his blood run hot and his stomach twist into a sickness so steep he stumbles to a stop for a moment.

_I will always take care of you, Yurochka, no matter what._

_Even when she is away, working, yes. I will be here._

“Don’t say that.”

Grandpa sighs, but says nothing.

A memory appears.

Yuri remembers walking, then running, and then running so fast not even the waters of the pond could stop him. He didn't realize: The pond was frozen over. Instead of splashing through the biting water, he glided. He glided and went on, on forever it seemed, until he was in the middle of the lake, an island of color and warmth, and all around was silence. He moved with ease – nothing could stop him.

He also knew that one bad step could lead to his death.

_Yurochka! My god!_ His grandfather, shouting, huffing as he ran over the hill just at the edge of the water bank. _Come back, little one!_

Yuri thought of running away – he remembers this now – and entering the stillness forever. The calm white of winter, the yawning sound of the snowy forests, eating up the wind and leaving only emptiness. Where else could he go? His mother was moving to the city and he was still here, alone on the ice, gliding away. He could keep going.

He looked back.

Grandpa had stepped onto the ice with great trepidation, arms lifted high to keep him steady. He looked angry and fierce, beard the same then as it looks now, perhaps slightly less grey – but even then it was a symbol of toughness, a manhood that Yuri struggled to imagine for himself.

There was also fear.

For the first time his all of his youth, Yuri saw fear flashing like hazard lights upon the old man’s face.

Yuri remembers now: Little Yurochka didn’t keep going. He didn’t cross his arms and pout, or shout back defiantly, or stomp away until he got his way.

He stopped and cried.

Cried and cried.

He cried until his grandfather reached him, and cried until they were at the edge of the pond together. He hadn’t realized how large it had been to him at the time. He hadn’t realized how far he’d tried to go alone, how his cheeks burned with cold, how his teeth rattled together in his skull.

_Well done, Yurochka. We’ll be together. We will be all right._

_Am I strong?_

_One day, you will skate across the entire pond._

_But not today._

_No, my small one. Not today. Not yet._

\--

He thinks of them dancing – how Yuuri’s face opens up, a secret side of him appearing like golden hills after a deep fog. How Viktor is focused in a way that doesn’t make his forehead wrinkle in pain – enraptured in something that doesn’t chain him in place.

The Katsudon knows…he’s been there, a little boy in the middle of a frozen pond, but he found his way back. From 6th to 2nd in the course of a year.

_Why do you skate, Yuuri Katsuki?_

Is that how purpose happens? Appearing to you one day, inexplicably, naked as all hell in the middle of your parents’ bath house?

Sadly, he remembers: It started before that.

No magic. Just practice.

\--

Finally, he is let back onto the rink.

“You’re going to have to take it easy for a bit or I will remove you from consideration completely,” Yakov says, a fight glinting in his stare.

“All right,” Yuri says.

Everyone stops for a second at his compliance. Mila asks him if he is still on pain meds. Yuri throws his tiger-stripe knit hat at her. But Viktor is smiling, mischievous, and Yuuri pats the younger Yuri mildly on the shoulder. _Good._

It’s normal. It’s a new challenge. The older boys managed to get through it. For how long did they have to fight? When was the struggle too much? How long will he be able to skate? (He still has a good decade in him, if Viktor is any indication, and there’s no way he won’t surpass Viktor Nikiforov in every way possible.) He lists out questions for Yakov to answer when he is in a better mood.

“That was a good jump,” he tells the Katsudon after he lands a quad salchow yet again. Yuuri regards him with wariness, but he smiles genuinely, too.

“Not bad for an old man,” he tells Viktor after a truly beautiful step sequence. The older two look at each other, and then promptly invite him to visit for lunch. _It’s been a bit_ , Yuuri says.

_Well, whatever,_ Yuri says, _but you’re right. Okay._

He knows he can’t fight time. But he can work with what he has and find a way across.

\--

“Did you decide on a theme?”

Yuri puts a hand to the sky, framing it between his fingers.

“Flight,” he says. Looking back. Stepping forward. Dancing together. Letting it go. “Breaking things.”

He smiles evilly, enjoying his joke. Grandpa just nods.

That's enough.


End file.
